The photographs wished not just to be looked at, but also perceived and remembered in a certain way. Perception and memory entertain twisted kinds of affiliation, and twisted was the space in which the images appeared in one of the side wings of the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel. Solid walls divided the space into three differently sized, interconnected parts: a corridor between the two entrances, a foyer and a picture gallery. The walls were white. A lot of light filtered in through the windows. The world outside was very much part of the experience of the viewer, who was the one single blind spot that kept moving in between the images. The display appeared as if it were a dynamic tool-kit for the fabrication of subjectivity as visual agency.

But fabrication is too instrumental a notion. Contingency was at the heart of the visual experience. The pictorial motifs were not substantial, although they conveyed a great deal of political, religious and, yes, aesthetic weight. The space both allowed and forced the images to contextualise themselves - in the mind of a viewer, of course, who was asked implicitly not only to look deep in time but also to come back, again and again. Over the course of the exhibition, the images changed. Different constellations of large-scale images were generated out of a repository of thirty smaller photographs displayed in one single row along the wall of the corridor. Like billboards, these images were pasted directly on the wall.

With two of the large images displayed in the foyer and five in the picture gallery, Lidwien van de Ven's installation was laid out in eighteen different episodes